off to Mount of Olives again..

this time made sure had decent batteries for my real camera, rather have to take pictures with the somewhat ropey camera on my phone.

Must of walked a good 10 miles today, as went as far into East Jerusalem next to the wall that divides into the west bank.

This time as well as see the massive Jewish cemetery and the Moslem one that closer to old walls, also saw Christian graves and went up further more away from the general tourist areas.  There is some truly breathtaking views here.   Now I know why it is the Mount of Olives, there are plenty of Olive trees on this bit!!

Some very cute and friendly Arab children whose house overlooks the Mount of Olives.  I am facing northwards here.

arab storekeeper van does massages?

The text on the back of this Arab shopkeeper’s van says “<arab script> except the massenger of Allah (pbuh)”

This little Subaru van looks too small for doing massages though?  Appears to have a foreign (oval?) set of licence plates under the Israeli ones. Got to love the racing stripes too.

Canaries in the Arab quarter / Arab women selling mint leaves

 

 

Canaries are popular pets with Arabs and often display them in their business premesis, you can often hear them sing whilst around the Arab quarter in the old city Jerusalem.   This little bird is put ontop of a stand of some tshirts which have mostly very political slogans.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I often see Arab women selling vegetables on their own in Arab parts of town, it almost always seems to be big bags of mint leaves.  I wonder if they grow this in a small allotment?

 

Africans at Kotel / Wedding around road works

Someone told me recently that there are lots of Africans coming to visit Israel, apparently its because countries like Nigeria, the government gave Moslem people free trips to Mecca, as most Moslem people try to make a pilgrimage there at least once during their life.   The Christian people thought thats not fair, can’t we have a free trip to Jerusalem to see the home of our faith?  So this was agreed and now large numbers of Nigerian Christians have been coming since.

I spotted a brightly dressed group here:

Above if you look carefully on the right there is some wedding pictures taken place, its a good job you can still get nice photos against the backdrop of the old walls despite the mess around the streets with the electric light rail system being built.

Smoke on the horizon / Arab hand carts

Was at the Kotel (Western Wall) last weekend, I noticed and some other people were a bit alarmed to see smoke in the distance by the Mount of Olives.  Checked the news later, didnt see any thing about any possible terrorist activity or anything else bad.

Have noticed lately that quite a few mostly Arab people use these brightly coloured blue and green hand carts to carry their wares up and down the stairs around the old city, the steps have sloped stones in the middle.   The back of the carts have a tyre draping down from a piece of rope, think this is to stop the cart from running away if the person operates it lets go by accident.

Ethiopian bar

Went to meet up with a friend in an Ethiopian bar.  In between a shoe shop and a 1 shekel store on Jaffa Street is a fairly unassuming alley way…Didn’t manage to get a pic of the front of the bar sadly.   The Ethiopian community make up a small percentage of various many different Jewish groups that are here in Jerusalem.  Sadly many of them don’t have good knowledge of Hebrew so may have difficulty getting work.

The bar itself feels basic but people are friendly, beer is cheap (Goldstar is 10 shekels) There is Ethiopian Reggae music always playing here, food is available.  Below is a kind of thick pancake with some beef and mushrooms and a small amount of very hot chilli.

Also below is a poster of some music event here.  Notice on the left is writing in Amharic (not to be confused with Aramaic which was used along with Hebrew during the time of Jesus)   this is a Semitic language used by the Ethiopian and Eritrean people.   It looks like a little like something you see by Aztecs, although its a left-to-right language like Western or European tongues, as opposed to right-to-left fashion Hebrew, Arabic and Persian uses.    Incidentally I found Windows XP doesn’t support Amharic in a normal fashion but Vista and 7 does.

More cutlery antics…

Heres another picture of the cutlery art stand, from my previous pic of the bottle opener taken hostage.

Pieces of broken clocks as well as kitchen metalware are used for all kinds of art.

Kind of like a modern day version version of Uri Geller, who is from Tel Aviv.

Ben Yehuda Street colourful back street gift shop

Kippots, wooden games sets, jewellery and nice scarves.

If birds could twitter to each other

Fans of brief blogging service Twitter might get this.

Pizza shop off of King George Street here in Jerusalem seems to often leave discarded food as feasts for passing birds from the park over the road.  I submitted and captioned this to a popular animal humour site.

Sign posts

Street signs in this part of the world are often very inconsistant in their spelling

These signs were back to back.  Another instance of this is Jaffa Street is also sign posted as Yaffo Street.   Looking on a map (on paper or off google maps)  spellings of road name vary wildly which can really confuse tourists.  Seems different English translations of Hebrew words are quite common.  Moshiach (Hebrew for Messiah) can also be spelt Mashiach or possible other ways as well.

As well as lot of graffiti I sometimes see, defacing signs for comedy and mischief purposes is something quite funny I see sometimes.

Look carefully and you can see this sign for King George Street actually has a sticker over it.   Maybe a B movie set in Jerusalem could actually quite interesting